Julie in the cemetery grove, her golden hair in the sun, already prepared to die, she had handed the photograph to Sorrow and she had said: They don’t realize that what they’re hiding from isn’t as bad as what they’re doing to themselves by hiding.
Sorrow had assumed she’d been talking about Verity and Hannah. She had been tracing lines between their families since that day, weaving a spiderweb of gossamer-fine relationships. Verity and Hannah. Patience and Julie. Devotion and Perseverance. Mothers and daughters, sisters and friends, neighbors and enemies, women alone and women surviving. Julie and herself.
She had forgotten about Cassie. Cassie, who had accused Patience of setting the fires even when nobody else believed it. Cassie, who had confronted Sorrow not once but twice, flinging insults and challenges in her face, in public where anybody could hear.
Cassie, who had been alone since her sister’s suicide, and was now missing.
“I’m going to look for her,” Sorrow said.
Grandma nodded.
Sorrow walked past the chicken coop, down the hill, around the field below the house. She touched her grandfather’s pickup as she passed; the metal was warm, gritty, solid.
She stopped at the edge of the apple trees. Ahead the dirt road headed west into the shadows. A chorus of insects sang. The orchard in evening was breathtakingly beautiful: shades of green shivering to silver when the air stirred, golden light touching the highest treetops and the hills beyond, the velvet sky clear, cloudless, magnificent.
She rubbed at her arms. She looked back at the house. Grandma was still standing on the porch, her face alight. A small woman and a small house, old mountains and old trees, all of it so warm and familiar it made her heart ache. Sorrow pressed her fingers briefly to the skin at the base of her neck, tried to steady her breath, to calm her nerves. She didn’t know where to go. She didn’t know where Cassie would run to hide from her family and herself.
The apple trees were a wall of green and brown, a border between daylight and darkness, with roots that had been clinging for centuries and branches so entangled the canopy itself had forgotten where one tree ended and another began. There might be diseases lurking in the trunks and leaves, there might be blights and bacteria, fungus and rot, but hidden, gnawing from the inside, easily missed if you didn’t know how to look, and there were so many different ways to look. Sorrow had been turning and turning in her mind, grasping for memories unreachable through a thicket of snapping branches and rustling leaves, but her past had never been lost. Her memories had never been unreachable. They had been here all along, waiting for her to see not a barrier of shadows but a living thing, a breathing thing, a land that shuddered when her heart beat, that rose and fell with every breath, that gathered grief and pain and tears and held them close, intimate as secrets, and did not forget.
She stepped from the field into the orchard. The sun was sinking behind the mountains, the sky a searing blaze of gold. She took another step, and the deep green shadows surrounded her. A soft breeze pushed through the trees, and it was cold, a startling bite, raising goose bumps on her arms.
There, at the base of the first tree in the row, was a small bead on a leather string. She leaned to pick it up. It was as round and red as a white rabbit’s eye. She rolled it between her thumb and forefinger, then tucked it into her pocket.
Three rows into the orchard she found a filigree lady’s fan open against the base of a tree. She picked it up, eased it closed, coaxed it open again. She had never known who it belonged to; she had never thought to ask. When she was a child the favors were gifts from the orchard to her, nothing more and nothing less. She tapped the fan closed, slid it into her pocket, and kept walking.
Barely fifty feet along she found a pocket watch dangling from the low branch of an apple tree. To George, Love Forever, From Catherine. She had read those names a hundred times as a child, tracing the engraving, admiring her treasure. She wondered now how Catherine had mourned her husband when he disappeared. How long she had remained hopeful that he would one day return.
“Okay,” Sorrow said.
She reached up to untangle the chain; her hands were shaking. When she held the watch she felt cool water dribble onto her fingers. She opened the clasp and shook it slightly, heard the patter of droplets on the ground. The face was cracked, both of the hands pointing toward midnight. A dank, mossy smell rose.
The cider brewers of Abrams Valley liked to talk about the different qualities of apples grown in different parts of the valley—more sour from the northern end, more bitter from the Lovegood end—endless arguments around and around about the terroir of every orchard, that unique combination of soil and geology and human care that made even apples of the same variety noticeably different. Perhaps the same could be said of girls growing up in the same place at different times, if the landscape beneath their feet and the world around them was changing. A mother’s illness growing stronger. A family’s isolation drawing in on itself. Dreams of escape washing away. Patience had always been trying to get Sorrow to listen to the orchard, to hear the memories that vibrated in its stones and trees. Sorrow had never been able to hear those echoes. The orchard spoke to her in a different way.
“Okay,” Sorrow said again. Her heart was thudding in her throat. “You have my attention. Show me where to go.”
She was whispering, her words barely more than the faintest exhale of breath, but as she spoke, the trees around her stirred in a sudden lift of breeze. The leaves rustled and turned, the grass rasped and swayed, and a shiver crept over her skin.
33
EIGHT YEARS AGO
OUTSIDE, THE WINTER day was bitter and gray. Icy snow scraped on the windows, and the wind worried and whined in the chimney. All the color had been sapped out of the world. When Sorrow looked over the barren soil of Grandma’s garden, the snow-covered lawn and field, the naked brown apple trees, she worried that she might forget how to see green, that her eyes wouldn’t even know what they were looking at when the first shoots pushed through the dirt and the first leaves unfurled.
Outside, the orchard had become another world, one crueler and less welcoming. Even though it was only March, Sorrow very much believed winter had long outstayed its welcome.
Inside, the house was warm and bright, and everything was normal until Patience asked about school.
“It’s okay if I just go by and talk to the high school, isn’t it?” she said.
Sorrow froze with a spoonful of soup halfway to her mouth. They were sitting at the table, her and Patience, a lunch of grilled cheese and tomato soup before them. Grandma had finished her own soup and gone to her room for a nap. Mom was at the sink, washing dishes. Steam from the running water fogged the window.
“Just to get some information?” Patience added.